Middlebury College

Banner/Web Prioritization Committee Introduction

We are writing to alert you to a new process for requesting web projects work from LIS.

When the new www.middlebury.edu site was launched this spring, with a new look and new features to support the activity of the College, we sifted through the many good ideas people had for improving our old website, and kept a running list of possible projects and improvements, which you will find here: go.middlebury.edu/web/projects. We are now turning our attention to that list. The new platform has also changed how our community thinks about the web, generating even more ideas. To make decisions about how we use the web to educate, communicate and run the business of the College, we need to engage in thoughtful planning that includes the perspective of all areas of the College.

To that end, we have formed a new group, the Banner/Web Prioritization Committee, that will look at medium-sized Banner and web programming projects to make sure we use our staffing and technology resources in ways that best serve the mission of the College.

Once a month, this group will meet to look at project requests and evaluate them on the following criteria:

Does this help serve the academic mission? (teaching and learning)

How many people will be served by this? Is the technology reusable? Are there other departments that could, and should, use this? (all members of the campus community and beyond vs. one department)

How much time will it take to accomplish this? (One week or 18 months)

Are there other non-personnel expenses associated with this? (licenses, servers, training, etc.)

How hard will it be to support this on an on-going basis? Does it require deep technical knowledge? Will the solution grow with our needs?

Does it help promote administrative efficiency? Will it help members of the community to communicate? Will it save time? Will it remove complex paper-based processes? Does it keep us in compliance with the law or with campus policy?

Can it help us recruit and retain the very best students?

Can it help us raise money for the College more effectively?

Will it increase revenue for the College?

Have the appropriate departments been consulted?

Does it help the College toward its goal of carbon neutrality?

If you would like to submit a project request you may either use the online form:

and email the completed form to Joe Antonioli ( jantonio@middlebury.edu ). Since some of the questions that need to be answered are technical in nature, we will be available to help you complete the form.

For the committee to have time to look at project requests, the form must be completed two weeks before the next meeting. The current deadline to be considered at the August meeting is July 22. You will be notified within a week of the meeting as to the status of your request.

We hope that this new process will ensure that we spend our time on the highest priority projects, and that the process itself will help us improve the College’s use of the web as a platform for accomplishing many of our ambitious goals.

2 thoughts on “Banner/Web Prioritization Committee Introduction”

Tom, this is a great question. We state that this is for “medium-sized Banner and web programming projects,” but it is not always easy to determine the size of the project in the early stages of planning. I am sure we will get requests that will not need to go through this process, that can be addressed in a few minutes through the normal course of our work. There will also be times where we will say “this request is going to take a while and involve a number of people, so it will have to go through the process.”

I am happy to meet with departments to talk about which of their projects will need to go through the process, please feel free to email me.